What I’ve Learned: 6–10
No one is coming to save you.
No one has it figured out.
We are all jacked up.
Stay humble, stay thirsty, and reach for the stars.
Smile and tell someone today that they matter and that God has a plan for them.
Coaching life was fantastastical for me.
I was able to be a full-time athletic director, a head coach, and fortunate enough to spend a lot of years around young people, including my own.
Over the span of two and a half decades, I met many.
I taught some things.
I learned far more.
The road was rocky and murky at times.
With the kids came the family, or maybe better said, the team around the athlete.
That is where the fun really began.
During my years coaching softball in Atlanta, I remember a mother and father walking up to me after practice upset about their daughter’s development.
She was six.
Six years old, playing 6U fast-pitch softball.
Neither parent had played organized sports, but they had very specific ideas about the drills we should run, the techniques we should use, and how their daughter needed to be developed.
I listened.
For thirty-five minutes.
I thanked them for their time and watched them walk back toward the parking lot.
My two assistant coaches, both former Major League Baseball players, were standing nearby.
One of them smiled and said something close to:
“You’re welcome to bench my kid next game and let that star family shine for a few games.”
So we did.
The next couple of games were a disaster.
Not long after that, the family left in search of a better coach and a better team.
Over the next ten years, I watched them spend what had to be a small fortune on lessons, training and travel sports.
I remember thinking later that if all that money had gone into an account for her, college tuition, books, room and board might have been sitting there waiting when she graduated from high school.
Turns out she did not need sports to tell her who she was….
The girl could paint.
Really paint.
She became a “successful” artist. Because that is all sports really is at the end of the day….entertainment art…and we all have a responsibility to foster that artistic side.
We were all staring at the softball field trying to figure out how to develop the athlete.
Her gift was somewhere else entirely.
My wife, Christy, developed a philosophy during those years that stuck with me and still does:
“Use sports. Don’t let sports use you.”
I understood that line better as I got older.
Later in my coaching career, the need to be right had faded.
What mattered more was making sure young people had a chance to enjoy the game and find their place in it.
Sometimes that meant cutting a kid from a team where meaningful playing time was never going to come.
Sometimes it meant adding a JV or freshman squad so more kids could play at a level where they could actually get on the field or the floor.
Maturity did not give me the power to change human behavior.
It did not make parents see what I saw.
It did not make kids see it either.
And it certainly did not make the team surrounding the athlete understand every decision I made.
The only thing I really had was the truth behind my motives.
And the willingness to look a kid in the face and tell them the truth.
Maybe that was part of coaching too.
A small introduction to adulthood.
Life is not always fair.
Everybody does not make the team.
Everybody does not start.
Sometimes you work hard and somebody else is still better.
Sometimes the answer is no.
And no one, I mean no one, is coming to save you.
I remember seeing one young man in public after he had quit one of my teams.
He had not quit because he wasn’t having fun.
His dad wasn’t having fun.
There is a difference.
When I saw him, I could see disappointment in him.
Maybe even regret.
Years earlier, I might have wanted him to know that I had been right.
By then I did not need that anymore.
I looked him in the eyes and told him the truth.
The same truth I had tried to tell him when he was on the team.
That is about all any coach really has at the end of the day.
The truth.
And whether the kid standing in front of you believes you cared enough to tell it.
Now I have the luxury of looking back over all those years.
The regrets are few.
The joys are many.
I think I stay on LinkedIn mostly for the former players who still use the moniker “Coach” when they greet me or send a congratulatory note.
There is something about that word.
I was so much older in my playing days than I am now after the experience of coaching.
The lessons and development opportunities continue to pile up, somehow moving from the pages of my mind toward my heart.
That’s the crux.
Show me your passions and I’ll show you your heart.
Show me your priorities and eventually they will expose the motives behind many of your actions and reactions.
Connect the two and eventually they tell the truth about you.
So if you get a chance to coach, if you find the time to lead or teach or train, understand that you have taken on both a calling and a responsibility.
Being married isn’t easy.
Parenting is the toughest job I have ever known.
But coaching, being called Coach, refined me.
It exposed the shadows and the motives.
For better and for worse, it showed me parts of myself I might otherwise have missed.
James warned people not to rush toward becoming teachers because teachers would be held to a stricter standard.
I understand that better now too.
There is weight in being the person standing in front of somebody else.
Especially a kid.
First you learn how to coach the game.
Then you learn how to coach the kid.
Eventually you learn that neither the game nor the kid belongs to you.
They may forget the score.
They may forget the drill.
They may even forget what you told them.
But there is a decent chance they will remember how it felt when you believed in them.
And every once in a while, twenty-five years later, they will see you somewhere or send you a note and call you Coach.
That may be enough.
Boutwell Jones
redclaygospel.com
NOTHING like a solid man of integrity 🫡